Man I get tired of saying this. Its not art that costs more in HD games. Its engineering, and has been, at most, 2x as much to develop on the PS360 combined than it is to develop a decent Wii title.  You get what you pay for.  No such thing as free lunch.  I could go on and on.

Most of the time, a good PS360 game costs about 1.5x as much as a good Wii game would. The huge amount of shovelware brings down the Wii's average cost -- not some magical ease of development.  Ambition drives cost more than anything else.  A game doesn't need to be ambitious to be good, but it helps.

The only time this rule gets broken is when a new (read: cheap) development house breaks out with a hot new game.  Most of the 3rd party successes, thusfar, on the Wii fall into this bucket, because, at the time these projects got started, only the "B" teams were getting assigned Wii projects.

That's no longer the case.  Western (I know nothing about Japanese studios) Wii budgets have already gone up (pretty much everywhere), and you'll see the results in about a year.

Groucho, that's what I've been told by a few publishers. The art was the big reason for the cost disparity. Not the only, obviously, but the biggest....at least according to them.

Our art budgets (at my workplace -- I work at one of the big ones) are driven almost entirely by project ambition. The technical capabilities of the destination platform are not the issue, nor the expense, really, from the art perspective. The engineers (and to a lesser extent, the designers) are the ones who end up getting to tackle those issues.

There are plenty of high budget Wii games on the horizon... trust me.

Hmm, so were talking like over 10 mill? 20 mill?

Interesting what your saying, product ambition. So i guess Wii fans are still waiting for this actual ambition in most cases.

Keep in mind that most good games take 2.5 - 3 years to develop, and a little over 2 years ago, most of the publishers thought the Wii was a pretty weak contender.

I trust you 100% on that last part.  I'm in the media and have been saying what you just said since last summer.  A lot of publishers have refocused a lot of their resources to Wii development and we'll start hearing about some of them real soon.

 That's just silly. This is one case were percentages are far more relevant than the solid numbers.

But sure, go ahead check the solid numbers. They're in the OP, but they won't do you any good.

Thanks Nutboy. I really enjoyed the numbers.

Bravo! Great Post!